Rika is a different case because she was cursed to live eternally, so life and soul existed there, but I don't believe that is applicable to every case.
She was not a different case and that point was never made. She was cursed by Yuta and her soul directly manifested as a Vengeful Curse spirit. The same thing is said about
sorcerers who die with regret and some
being famous for this.
We all know that the basic concept of a curse is negativity, not life. Rika was someone cursed to live by Yuta's negativity, not by herself. If someone curses you may end up "reviving" as a curse, but on your own I don't see how that can happen since this was never contextualized
Negativity clearly creates all the time. That's literally the whole idea behind curses. So yes, Negativity can grant "life" to a dying shaman by incarnating their souls as Vengeful cursed spirits. It was contextualized, there is literally a universal rule to sorcerers to prevent this process from happening.
Don't get me wrong, it's clearly not going to be like them just becoming revived. They would just leave behind their vengeful spirit in whatever form that would manifest as. Similar to Rika, but we directly were told her soul did get cursed and she stated that
"she enjoyed the past 6 years" with Yuta so her soul was indeed present throughout. I also don't think it is particularly something that can be done actively, it all depends on the mindset and time to dwell upon death. We see that Yuta created her by having intense
emotional thoughts about seeing her death which manifested her. So this "immortality" wouldn't really be something one could actively use, and they wouldn't really be coming back as "themselves".
So whats the evidence for Conceptual Manipulation, and as Staff I have to state that, regardless of who it is and what's said, we do not use opinions and answers given by users that are not on the site. So no going Ultima said this in Discord or DMs or or whatever, if its not public avaliable in a Wiki Forum thread it doesn't matter.
Humans collectively birth curses via shared awareness of
"images" "emotions",
"concepts" and
"thoughts" they are about phenomena. This encompasses things like
insect plagues,
natural disasters, and even
man-made fiction or
folklore. The mechanism for this process is
cursed energy. Which is used by the shamans to create their techniques,
manifest and
expand innate domains (barrierless manifestations being called
"true sorcery"), and is pretty much is responsible for all
superhuman feats and
abilities outside of some
rare cases. Gojo, someone who could already "
bring infinity into reality"
[2], discussed learning the
core of cursed energy on his deathbed, and states his brain was needed to learn how to construct his
"imaginary technique".
A long-running background question of the series was the ontology of the soul and body, and which is a priori. Originally we were lead to believe it was the
soul from Mahito, a cursed spirit embodying human hatred but this was
challenged by experimentation. We found out later in the manga that information is fundamental to both spirit and matter and gives things their essences in the verse. Ogami, a shaman in the manga, was able to summon the physical information of a character into another human and have them take said person's "form" while keeping his
"spiritual information" separate so as to not bring back the "soul" or "personality" of the person she was summoning. However, Toji (the person whose body she summoned) was able to dominate the soul of the person trying to utilize his body with just his physical information, aka retaining his self-concept or personality. Indicating that information is what actually grants "essence" (hence why Toji could manifest his personality from solely his body info) on a level more fundamental than mental, spiritual, or physical levels. Which has also been highlighted in
other spots in the manga.
Thusly, this information (and by extension cursed energy which is directly tied to it and can interact with it) is responsible for the curses being manifested, even by humans
who can't actively use or
are aware of their
cursed energy. So I made the thread to get clarification on the boundary between something like this and concept manip since our info pages don't really cover this, and Yuri said it should count for type 3.
As for the second part of your post, I did talk to Ultima on Discord, but I also invited him to post in the thread so that others could see his opinion which he did.